Hospital safety index: Guide for evaluators (second edition)

This document is a guide for evaluators for the Hospital Safety Index, providing a step-by-step explanation of how to use the Safe Hospitals Checklist, and how the evaluation can be used to obtain a rating of the structural and nonstructural safety, and the emergency and disaster management capacity of the hospital. The guide is intended and has been used by ministries of health and other health entities, other government ministries and agencies, and public and private hospitals across the six regions of WHO, who have joined their counterparts in the Americas in applying and adapting the Hospital Safety Index. 

After the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization (WHO) released the first version of the Hospital Safety Index in 2008, the growing interest in safe hospitals led to calls from countries and other stakeholders for the revision of Hospital Safety Index to make it a truly global assessment tool, applicable to all hazards and all country contexts. The new Hospital Safety Index meets specific considerations of regions, including sections on assessing the availability and training of the health workforce and the security of health facilities, staff and patients. 

This document is n° 2 in the Safe Hospitals Initiative series.